[Simulchaord-discuss] Purpose submitted to Savannah

[Paul Fernhout]

This was the purpose submittes to Savannah for their approval. This
project must remain true to this purpose to remain on Savannah (or amend
it with the approval of Savannah administrators).

"Simulation of chaordic processes" project

This project is mainly to develop simulations of chaordic processes,
organizations, and systems, under the GPL license, with "chaordic" used
as
defined by Dee Hock at http://www.chaordic.org and in his book "Birth of
the Chaordic Age". The focus will be specially on computer simulations
to
support part of the goal defined here 
  http://www.chaordic.org/who_hist.html#FourCond
of: "Development of visual and physical models of chaordic organizations
so
that people have something to examine, experiment with, and compare to
existing organizations. The models must contain the ethical and
spiritual
dimensions generally lacking in current models. In addition, computer
simulations will need to be created to allow people to quickly see how
clarity of purpose and principles allow institutions to self-organize,
evolve over decades, and link in new patterns for an enduring
constructive
society."

One can in some ways view the GPL itself as defining a constitution for
a
chaordic process of software development.

Other organizational forms such as hierarchies, meshworks, or mixes of
them may also be simulated in part to compare and contrast them with
chaordic forms. See for example Manuel de Landa\'s discussion of
"Meshwork vs. Hierarchy" in organizations in his book "One Thousand
Years of Nonlinear History". Online, see an example of his writing on 
this at:
  http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
Another motivation is my own thinking about "many senses of self" --
that
is, one individual may belong in many overlapping organizations (person,
family, church, company, club, state, ecology, world) and may have to
decide how to allocate their efforts across all these potentially
conflicting demands. These issues could play an important role in
illuminating chaordic decision making in a simulation.

The initial codebase will be in Python and will use as appropriate cross
platform toolkit interface libraries such as the Python tkinter (Tcl/Tk)
or
wxPython (wxWindows) libraries, 
  http://www.python.org/topics/tkinter/
  http://www.wxpython.org/
so it should run on GNU/Linux as well as possibly other platforms. It is
possible versions of such simulations written for other free programming
language systems that run on GNU/Linux such as Java, TCL, Scheme, Lisp,
or
Smalltalk may be created down the road. No dependency on non-free
software is anticipated; dependencies on non-free software are also not
permitted in a project hosted on Savannah.

It does not exist yet but I'm working on it.

-Paul Fernhout
Kurtz-Fernhout Software 
=========================================================
Developers of custom software and educational simulations
Creators of the Garden with Insight(TM) garden simulator
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com